I remember the days when I surfed Compuserve at 300 bps. Well, we've sure come a long way from those days. I get an average of 5 Mbps download speed through Time Warner at my house now. It's great! The speed increase allows for a much richer experience including almost no wait-times for web pages to load and the ability to interact with much better levels of multimedia like sound, video, etc...
With the nature of the Internet being "always on", and the fact that my company provides managed services of Internet applications for clients all over the world, I'm online a lot! And when I'm not actively online, I'm available. The challenges in the past, at least for me, have been 1) service coverage; 2) connection hassle; and 3) connection speeds.
Service coverage is pretty extensive nowadays. We use Verizon for mobile phone services and my experience is very positive in regards to coverage. When the higher speed option (EVDO) is not available, it usually can still connect at the lower speed (1x) option. So while the speed may be painful at times, I can still generally get online.
Connection hassles are still a concern for me, but are improving. Currently many notebook PCs can be purchased with cell-phone "modems" (I think they are referred to as antennas) pre-installed. Even if not, most vendors, like Sprint and Verizon, sell a PC card that can be installed to allow a wireless connection to the Internet.
For me, I want a PDA device so I can stay quickly in touch and not have to crank up a PC - no matter how light - just to get online. But, I also want the ability to connect a PC without paying 2x (one for the PDA and one for a PC card) to achieve this. I currently use the Samsung i730 and it does allow these two connection options. The hassle is that for the i730 I need to switch to data mode on the PDA, get out the cradle, cradle the PDA, connect the cradle to the PC via USB, open special Verizon software, then connect to the Internet. I want to be able to power on a PC, set the phone next to it (BlueTooth?), and be online. I notice that Verizon has a couple of smart phones that claim to support this - I may give one a try soon.
Other issues aside, connection speed is still WAY lagging behind what homes and businesses are achieving now. I may get 700 Kbps on a good day via the i730, but that feels painfully slow compared to the 5 Mbps+ I get when hard-wired. That's a whole lot better than the Compuserve days, but when you are used to a certain level of service, it is hard to take steps backwards to something "less". At 700 Kbps web pages load fairly well, but forget about a decent multimedia experience (or anything other than quick and basic RDP operations).
What's the solution? Patience I think. Reading this week about WiMax, I see that Sprint and Clearwire have teamed up to push WiMax out faster. WiMax claims we will see speed averages between 2-4 Mbps with bursting abilities up to 10 Mbps. Wow. When/if this really works out for them in cost and physical infrastructure, I expect this will have a huge impact on almost everything we do. I imagine vehicles will be connected (perhaps engineered smart enough to detect when a WiMax enabled smart phone is inside the car) and enabled for tons of new "live" features. I expect Google will have some sort of GPS + Google Maps option targeted specifically for this high speed option. How about streaming music to your smart phone rather than depending on an MP3/iPhone device to store the files locally? How about the kids having the option in the back seat to download or stream the latest Disney movie during a long trip? How about being able to quickly access a variety of sites to get a quick answer to a topic that unexpectedly came up?
There are a number of other advancements needed besides the speed, but I think they will come once the bandwidth is there. The latest estimate I've read is that 100 million customers will have WiMax options available by the end of 2008.
Besides being a great advancement for us as consumers, there are some business implications. One implication is that more people will be online more often - meaning you need to be sure your Internet sites and applications are also online and available when requested. Another implication is that customers will expect a richer experience now that they have the bandwidth - so make sure that wherever your servers are hosted, whether in your corporate offices or with a service provider, you have plenty of bandwidth available as needed.
(At ORCS Web we have over 1.5 Gbps of bandwidth available with the option to add more as needed. We also have experienced staff that specializes in support and management of Microsoft hosted solutions requiring high-availability and high-scalability architectures.)
If anyone has experience with other mobile connections, or more information about the technology options (both available now and coming soon), or just wants to comment on the topic - I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to post a comment.
~Brad
http://www.orcsweb.com/
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